Changing Priorities
by Ice Cube1
Summary: Tag for Friends and Enemies. If you had asked Michael on the day he left home for boot camp, he would have told you he never wanted to go back to Miami. It was a driving factor in everything he did. Funny how things change.
1. Never Coming Back

**Title: Changing Priorities**

**Author: Ice Cube**

**Rating: T**

**Spoilers: 4x01 Friends and Enemies, quote from 3x05 Signals and Codes**

**Disclaimer: Right, if I owned them anywhere outside of my dreams, the characters that are forthwith mentioned in this story would be making me a lot of money and very happy…so no, they aren't mine, and I'm just out of school with no money, so if you're going to sue, feel free, you won't get anything. **

**Characters: Michael, mentions Fiona and the Westen family**

**Archives: Feel free; just let me know where so I can find it again.**

**Summary: Tag for Friends and Enemies. If you had asked Michael on the day he left home for boot camp, he would have told you he never wanted to go back to ****Miami****. It was a driving factor in everything he did. Funny how things change.**

**Warnings: Written in the span of about an hour when the plot bunny bit hard – it's the first time I've written in the first person, so I'm not sure how it turned out.**

**I don't have my stories beta'd, I'm too impatient to wait for someone to proof it after I've written it, so I apologize for any mistakes, and if you email me to tell me that they're there, I'll fix them later. **

**Reviews are always a plus; it's great to know that people are reading my stories and that they evoke some strong reactions, but as I'm a horrible reviewer, I won't hold my breath for them. Constructive criticism will be taken under advisement. Flames, however, will be treated with the utmost respect they deserve…they will be ignored completely or poked fun at with friends.**

**That said, on with the tale…**

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_"You know what, I am like Spencer. We both see the world a certain way and we both have skills to make it a better place. That's not a bad thing. I don't want to keep ducking this, so let me be straight with you. This job, what we just did, saving American lives, this is the type of work I was made for, Fi. It's what my old job gave me a chance to do every single day. So, no, getting back in isn't just a way to survive, to protect the people I love. It's what I want. And if you truly care about me, you should damn well want for me what I want for myself." _**~ Signals and Codes 3x05**

When I left Miami at seventeen, it was with fifty bucks in my pocket, the absolute conviction that I was never coming back, and a change of clothes in a ratty old backpack that my mother had bought for me when I was ten. She had been so proud of the purchase that despite the fact that it had gotten me beaten up for weeks – at school and at home – I had never asked for another one. I spent the majority of the ride from my house to the recruiter's office staring at the pack and thinking about what it represented. Andre's father was going on and on about how proud he was that I was going to serve my country, and how it was an honor to know a man like me. How he wished that his oldest son was coming with me. Here I was, a scared shitless kid off to places unknown and all I could think about was the look on my own family's faces. Each one was burned indelibly into my memory, and even now, two decades later, I can still call the images clearly into focus.

Fiona thinks that I've always been overly patriotic, always had a ridiculous sense of honor to my country and a need to serve some faceless alphabet soup agency. And maybe that _has_ always been a part of me; I don't know. All I know is that when I was sitting in the back of that car, waiting to be issued uniforms and shipped off to who knows where, honor and service were the furthest things from my mind. I was such a bundle of barely concealed emotions that if I'd had a month to simply sit and catalogue them, I still don't know if I could have figured them all out.

I didn't enlist in the Army a week shy of my high school graduation for any reason other than it gave me a legitimate reason to run. To finally get out of my house and leave my dysfunctional family far behind. Someone had planted the bug in my head at a career day at school three years previous, and it had never left my mind. Every good grade, every sports practice and weight room session, every time I rolled with the punches at home and pissed off my father enough to make him want to get me out of the house – it was all part of my escape. If I could have, I would have taken Nate with me – but a kid barely into his teenaged years doesn't exactly fit in a duffel bag.

That, and it wouldn't have let me really leave it all behind. The day I left home, I was leaving behind the whole family; the way they made me feel; the path my life was headed down. I needed to get away from it all and I planned on never coming back. I was a coward – something that I've been working on making reparations for every day over the past twenty years. I couldn't take the looks that seemed to be permanently etched onto my family's faces. I had to get away from the absolute abhorrence in my father's eyes, the sad resignation and defeat in my mother's, and the betrayal and hatred that graced Nate's face.

It was Nate that hurt the worst. I'd spent years falling in front of my father's fists and belt to keep the kid out of the line of fire, and somewhere along the way he'd started to take that for granted. I'm the older brother, so clearly it was my job to take all of his licks and keep smiling. To get him out of every single jam he got himself into, and to make sure that he could keep on being the good son my mother thought he was. It didn't take him long after I told him Dad had signed the form for the kid to realize that his human shield was going to disappear. I don't think he's ever really forgiven me for that.

At the time, though, that didn't matter. I was free. For the first time in my life, I had no attachments, no reason to fear waking up in the morning, no one to fill me with guilt, hurt, or letdown just by being in the same room with me. I'd heard the stories about how boot camp broke you down to build you back up, and it sounded like the best idea in the world. Somewhere along the line, I'd realized just how much I hated the person my father had molded me into – a trouble maker, a fighter, a bully, and a downright juvenile delinquent. My motivations may have been different from his – I always, _always_ had a reason for the trouble I caused – but it didn't change the fact that I was my father's son. The Army was my chance to change.

And change me it did. At some point, without even realizing, I left behind the scared kid I was and became the man that Fiona doesn't quite understand. I realized just how much I enjoyed working behind the scenes and below the radar to save American lives. It didn't take long for my superiors to realize that I had a natural aversion to taking orders that they couldn't seem to break me of, but that I was excellent at what they were training me to do. I breezed through Special Forces training, and made a name for myself as being innovative and determined.

Promotions weren't high on my list of priorities – which was good since I tended to bristle against my CO's, but I did what it took to get the job done and did it efficiently. I was sitting in a brig – busted down a rank and cooling my heels thanks to another pissed off commanding officer – on some base in the middle of some country when I was recruited into covert operations. I had a chance, they said through the bars of the cell next to mine, to do what I was doing now – only with fewer regulations, far less time for leave, and far more freedom to be my own boss. More excuses not to go back to Miami and fewer people to piss off by doing my own thing my own way? I never looked back.


	2. Please Get Me Home

If you'd asked me back then, hell if you'd asked me three years ago, I would have told you that I never wanted to go back to Miami. I'd spent years upon years putting myself into a position where it was like Florida didn't even exist and that all the memories there were just figments of yet another cover identity. Sure, it's hard to erase the scars of the past, but I tried my damnedest to make sure that that's all they were. So imagine my surprise when I'm sitting in a holding cell in some "document processing center" in some country with the best tangerines, reading through a lengthy intelligence report, and all I can think about is how to get back to Miami. It was distracting, to say the least, and almost frightening. I'd spent my entire career officially being nowhere, with no past and no ties, and now all I could think about was getting back to Fiona, to my mother, to Sam and my clients and my life. And I had no illusions or fantasies that that was going to happen any time soon.

I'd dealt with Victor and Carla and saw how they operated under Management's thumb, so I had no reason to believe that Vaughn would be any different. I figured that after we got back from Hart's untimely death, he'd have another little mission for me to risk my life for. He'd asked me how it felt to be out of Miami, and my instinct was that I was overjoyed. But the truth was, I wasn't. I was pretty sure that the feeling in the pit of my stomach was what homesickness felt like – I'd heard about it often enough from the men in my unit during my first tour of duty.

So as I walked away from Vaughn towards the car that was going to take me back to my mother, I once again couldn't catalogue all the emotions that were roiling through me. Relief, anticipation, confusion, hope; they were all there and vying for attention. Most of all, I wanted to get back to the semblance of normal that I had cultivated since being burned. I had spent over a month thinking it was never going to happen, had spent so much time tense and on edge, looking for any opportunity to go home. To be doing just that without having to shoot my way out and beat a tactical retreat with the hounds of Hell nipping at my heels? To say it was a little unsettling was a major understatement.

Life used to be so simple. I did what I had to because it was what needed to be done – there were no ulterior motives, no reason to look back at what I was doing and how it affected the people around me. If I broke the law, it was as a means to an end. If I worked with someone who wasn't an upstanding citizen, then so be it. That was all. Now? Now I had no idea what to think and how to react to all of this. I had people that I could trust, people that I wanted to be around. People that I needed to tell me that what I was doing was the right thing for the right reasons. I needed the reassurance that I hadn't expected to be given since before Nate was born and the most difficult thing I had to do was color in between the lines. I knew exactly where I needed to go to get that – and it was a city that I never would have expected to hold my salvation.

When I finally made it home, I didn't know what to expect and I knew going in that I wouldn't have any way of predicting that. I had every conversation I'd ever had with Fiona trying to make me see that there was life outside of being a spy running through my head as I headed to find her. I just wanted to know that it had all been worth it.

And then she pretty much kicked me in the shins, stomped on my stomach, and tossed me in a car wondering if I'd stepped into the Twilight Zone sometime between spending ten hours in a cargo bay and getting into the Charger for the first time in over a month. Here I was needing some time with her – time to just be "Michael and Fiona" without the outside world pushing down on us – and she was focused solely on the job at hand. It threw me so completely for a loop that I couldn't get a handle on it. I knew somewhere deep inside of me that I was being petty, but I just wanted five minutes to get my feet under me before getting back to business as usual.

Then she smacked me in the face and back to reality. Her closed fist bruising my chin mattered far more than her words. The feel of her lips against mine as she finally welcomed me home grounded me, and I couldn't help how desperately I grabbed onto her, hugging her so tightly against me that it was almost as if I was trying to physically become a part of her. Trying to make it so that no one could tell where I ended and she began. It was only a second, but it was long enough to let out all of the stress and fear left over from being locked up with no understanding of why.

She was here, I was here, and despite thinking that I'd never get to see her again, I was in her arms and felt safe. Finally. This was a woman who was my past, my present, and – I was finally beginning to understand – my future. Without her, it just wasn't worth it. None of it. Not the job, not my reputation, not the safety that getting out from under this burn notice would provide for my family. Strickler had shown me that I wouldn't put getting back in over having her, but it had taken leaving Miami behind again to prove it to me completely.

All the lives I could save, all the good I could do for my country, it no longer meant anything to me if it meant that I couldn't have her with me, holding me together and keeping the pieces of my psyche from falling by the wayside. With her to come limping back to, with her to patch me back up and keep me human, there was no way I'd ever turn into Simon. I wanted to be with her, be part of her, more than I wanted to be the person I had been made to be. Suddenly, being "Fiona's Michael" was far more important than anyone else I had ever pretended to be. This version of me, if I could pull it off – it would be the real me, and she'd never again have to guess who I really was.

Utopia would be managing to figure out this whole mess that started with Simon's escape while having Fiona happily by my side, guns blazing, C4 in her possession. Guess we'll just have to work on that.

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**The entirety of the season premiere was a lot more emotionally driven on Michael's part than I expected, but the thing that really hit me was the look on his eyes when he almost collapses into Fiona outside the loft. It took a couple of times watching it before I picked up on it, but that look is where this little fic came from. Can't wait to see what the rest of the season brings with it.**


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